I have trouble keeping my appointments. I didn't use to, but one day my parents told me to buy an agenda. They thought they were doing me a favour.

So I started writing down all my appointments in my agenda, which was great: I didn't have to remember them any more! Unfortunately, I had to remember to check whether I had any. So much for my appointments.

Luckily, cellphones came in. Now, that is handy stuff. Not only do they keep your appointments for you, they also remind you of them! And they do a bunch of other cool stuff too. For instance, they keep track of your friends' birthdays, which is great for someone like me. I used to remember them -or tried, at least. Now, I don't have to. The phone does the job for me. The only drawback was I had to put the birth dates in my hand. And that was kind of cumbersome.

Then came facebook and solved all my birthday problems: it reminds me of somebody's birthday, no matter what! And I don't have to do anything at all! Of course, now remembering them isn't as meaningful as it used to be, but it never held much meaning for me anyway.

The Internet is a really great invention. For example, one used to have to memorize all kinds of facts about history and geography: now doing that is pointless, since you can get the information in less than thirty seconds. All you need is wikipedia or google maps. So I can free up all of that mental space for more creative endeavours.

I also like travelling. A lot. I used to remembering the things I saw, until I bought a camera. It became quite pointless afterwards. I mean, it's all up in facebook, anyway. If I want to immerse in a trip down memory lane, all I have to do is turn on my computer, go to my profile and start surfing through the posts in my wall.

All of this is great stuff, especially when you take into account that everybody's got smartphones now, so all you need to do -should you forget anything- is go online any time, anywhere and voilà! Your memory is back. For example, I keep forgetting the name of this actor who plays Alan Shore in Boston Legal, but thanks to imdb I can look it up whenever I want.

With all of this discussion the point I'm trying to get across is: smartphones (combined with the Internet) are nothing but an external memory device. And by memory I don't mean computer-style memory, but our own memory. Smartphones help us store our memories elsewhere, so we don't have to carry them around in our brain.

And now probably you'll guess I'm just going to ramble about how this is only the beginning and then we'll all turn into robots and then conquer the universe, but no.

Though that may happen.

I just want to raise the following issue: does facebook have too much of our data? And by this I do not mean "facebook has privacy issues", which is a well-known fact hardly anyone would dare to challenge. What I mean is: facebook stores in its servers a lot of what makes us who we are. Our thoughts, our pictures, the songs we like. Our memories. Our personal memories. Memories we dump in there while we retain them very dimly in our own heads.

What if someone decided to mess with that?

For example, what if, ten years in the future, some facebook employee with a sense of humour decides to tamper with your photos and delete some people, or change the setting? What if they change your wall posts?

What if you saw a post, ten years from now, you didn't remember having written? Who would you trust? Facebook or the memories you barely hold on to? How do you know this hasn't already happened?

When we trust some external company with all of that data, we trust them with who we are and we give them enormous power over us. If some Orwellian nightmare were to happen in the near future, it would be a piece of cake for them to play us like toys. All they would need would be our facebook account.

It's already scary to think about the power companies like google have over our lives. But I think it's a lot scarier when you realize if they wanted they could mess with the very essence of who we are: our memories.